U.S. Politics Look Like a Bad Marriage

Psychologist John Gottman identified four communication patterns that predict divorce; all are present in U.S. politics today.

Key Points

• Character attacks, not policy debates, are now the primary mode of political communication
• Contempt in public discourse trains people to see opponents as “others” who are less worthy and less human
• Grievance narratives teach followers to distrust any attempts at institutional oversight as corrupt
• Democracy erodes when as shared institutions like courts and elections lose public legitimacy.

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For most of its history, the United States has resembled a quarrelsome but committed couple. We bicker, disagree, and occasionally give each other the silent treatment, but underneath it all there has been a shared sense that we are in this together. Today, though, the tone has shifted. The fights feel meaner, more personal, and less about solving problems than about dominating others. If this were a marriage, therapists would be sounding the alarm.

Dr. John Gottman identified four communication patterns so devastating to a relationship that he called them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling predict divorce with over 90% accuracy (Gottman, 2023). These same patterns now characterize much of our political discourse, doing real damage to our sense of “us” as a country.

Over the past decade, a style of politics that is loud, angry, and relentlessly personal has demonstrated that permanent combat, public humiliation, and grievance can be politically effective. Once that style proved successful, it spread. Parties imitated it, media monetized it, and citizens who saw their fears and resentments reflected in it shared it further. The result is not just polarization of opinion; it creates a hierarchy of human value and turns politics into a relational culture that looks disturbingly like a marriage heading for divorce.

Criticism: From Policy Disagreement to Character Assassination

The first horseman is criticism. Gottman draws a clear distinction between a complaint and a criticism. A complaint targets behavior; criticism attacks character. “I’m upset you didn’t call” is a complaint. “You’re selfish and never think of anyone but yourself” is criticism. In today’s politics, we have largely abandoned complaints. Instead of arguing that a policy is harmful or misguided, political voices increasingly leap to global character judgments. Opponents are corrupt, stupid, un-American, even subhuman.

Campaign rhetoric and daily messaging regularly deploy sweeping labels for whole categories of citizens, journalists, and public servants, casting them as enemies or worse. This is not the rough and tumble of ordinary democratic debate. It is a deliberate move to define disagreement as evidence of moral defectiveness and disloyalty, and research on partisan dehumanization confirms that these character-level attacks, far more than policy disagreements, drive reduced interpersonal tolerance and moral disengagement (Cassese, 2019).

When citizens repeatedly hear that those on the other side are fundamentally bad, compromise feels like complicity and coexistence feels like betrayal. At the national level, that mindset slowly erodes the belief that people who disagree with us are still part of “us,” not “them.”

Contempt: Humiliation as Political Entertainment

If criticism is corrosive, the second horseman, contempt, is lethal. Gottman identifies it as the single strongest predictor of relationship breakdown. Contempt goes beyond anger. It signals “I am better than you,” and it shows up as mockery, sarcasm, and sneering superiority.

Contempt has become a kind of political performance. Rallies, press events, and social media feeds regularly feature leaders mocking opponents’ appearance, intelligence, or background and turning entire communities into punchlines. Public shaming and character attacks are framed as authenticity or “telling it like it is” (Syed et al., 2020). The damage extends well beyond hurt feelings. Contempt divides the world into “real” citizens and those who do not fully count, and when leaders model that division openly, it seeps into everyday relationships, licensing supporters to treat neighbors, coworkers, and local officials the same way.

Defensiveness: Grievance Politics and the Collapse of Accountability

The third horseman, defensiveness, appears when a partner meets complaints with denial, counterattack, or victimhood rather than responsibility. In politics, defensiveness has evolved into a full-blown grievance narrative. When confronted with criticism, oversight, or even routine checks and balances, many leaders respond by casting themselves and their supporters as persecuted victims of a rigged system.

Investigations become witch hunts, courts and agencies are dismissed as biased, and journalism is recast as a partisan weapon rather than a democratic safeguard. Research on democratic erosion identifies the delegitimization of institutions designed to constrain power with the rhetoric of defending “true democracy” as one of the clearest warning signs of institutional decline (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). In relational terms, it is the equivalent of deciding that every therapist is biased and every friend who offers honest feedback is secretly working against you.

This pattern does more than shield individual leaders from accountability. It teaches followers that no negative information about their side can be trusted and that any official oversight is inherently corrupt. Once defensiveness hardens into a worldview, shared facts disappear. Without the possibility that “our side” might be wrong, there is no space left for self-correction. The only thing remaining is escalation.

Stonewalling: Walking Away from Shared Reality

Stonewalling, the fourth and most dispiriting horseman, is emotional withdrawal, tuning out, shutting down, refusing to stay in the conversation long enough to repair. A stonewalling partner goes emotionally blank or leaves the room. It can look calm from the outside, but it signals something devastating: there is no one present to work things out with.

At the national level, stonewalling looks like abandoning shared reality. When leaders repeatedly tell followers that elections, courts, and scientific institutions cannot be trusted, they effectively declare that no uncomfortable fact needs to be reckoned with. People retreat into separate media ecosystems, each with its own experts, narratives, and “facts.” This is not a sudden collapse. It is a slow erosion, as the public spaces that support democracy, such as vote counts, courtrooms, and public hearings, become contested ground. We are no longer arguing about what to do. We are arguing about what is real.

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

When the four horsemen become habitual, when they are the default rather than the exception, a relationship is in serious trouble. Looking at our politics, it is hard not to feel a similar unease. Personal attacks, public humiliation, permanent grievance, and retreat from shared facts have moved from the margins to the center. We are separated, but we haven’t filed papers.

The hopeful part of Gottman’s work is that the horsemen are warning signs, not destiny. Couples who recognize these patterns and replace them with specific antidotes, softer conversation openings, genuine appreciation, willingness to take responsibility, and the capacity to self-soothe rather than flood and shut down, can repair even entrenched conflict. The same logic applies to us as a country. Democratic cohesion will not be restored by finding the perfect savior or vanquishing a single villain. It will be restored by changing the relational culture, rewarding leaders who argue without dehumanizing, who accept accountability without collapsing into grievance, and who stay at the table even when they lose.

America has always been diverse, messy, and full of conflict. The question now is not the finger-pointing of “who started the fight?” but whether we can return to disagreement in ways that make staying together possible. The four horsemen are already in the house. Whether they carry us toward deeper rupture or toward the harder and more honest process of repair depends on whether we stay stuck in the comfort of righteous anger or recognize them as symptoms of something that needs repair.

References

Cassese, E. C. (2019). Partisan dehumanization in American politics. Political Behavior, 41(1), 29–50.

Gottman, J. (2023). What predicts divorce? The relationship between marital processes and marital outcomes. Routledge.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.

Syed, F., Akhtar, M. W., Kashif, M., Asrar-ul-Haq, M., Ain, Q. U., Husnain, M., & Aslam, M. K. (2020). When leader is morally corrupt: Interplay of despotic leadership and self-concordance on moral emotions and bullying behavior. Journal of Management Development, 39(7–8), 911–928. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMD-05-2019-0183